Dieting's no fun. Plates of salad with no chips in sight. Glasses of water instead of foaming pints of beer. Exercise. Harrowing early morning jogs in the pouring rain instead of lying in a nice warm bed. It's a terrible business.

Yes, I'll go to ridiculous lengths just to fit into a new pair of trousers. Or, according to an article I stumbled upon this week, I'll go to ridiculous lengths just to look more like my favourite video game character. An article published by the American Psychology Association suggests that game playing males are having an increasing problem with their body image:

'Obsessive exercising is on the rise among men and boys, and one culprit may be the hypermuscular video game characters found in magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer [...] Boys who read many such magazines tended to report greater body dissatisfaction after a year of exposure than boys who read sports, fitness and even fashion magazines.'

Rather like Hollywood movies or superhero comics, video games are populated almost entirely by characters with perfect bodies. It's a parallel universe of globular bosoms, improbably muscular torsos, of slim waists and good hair days.

It's an unsurprising (and understandable) fact that many women are bemused and occasionally offended by their gender's portrayal in video games - the outlandishly proportioned mammaries on display in Soul Caliber IV are a recent example. But male game characters often fare little better, even if they're not objectified in quite the same way as their female counterparts (unless you count Cho Aniki - but that's a game far too disturbing to dwell on for any length of time).

For anyone who thinks that body image isn't a relevant issue in video games, it's worth noting that villainous characters are almost always portrayed as fat or in some way deformed - a stark contrast to most games' protagonists who generally conform to a physical ideal.

As pointed out by The Guardian newspaper when it was released four years ago, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas positively discouraged being under- or over-weight; should you allow your character to indulge in too many burgers, he'd rapidly sprout a distended gut and incite howls of derision from passers by. Eating too little, meanwhile, would make him weak and hopeless at fighting - regular workouts at the gym were the only route to success.

So will video games portray a more diverse range of body shapes? In the current climate, this doesn't seem likely; while we've had a few interesting exceptions, such as the bespectacled Gordon Freeman, the cheerfully chubby Super Mario or the receding hairlines of Kane and Lynch, it seems that, for now, video games are more content to conform to ideals and stereotypes rather than try something more adventurous. This, I feel, is a shame - I'm becoming quite tired of the typical 'jock' characters that clutter up games like Unreal and the recent Turok reboot.

Games are now at the point where they can move beyond the stereotypes and visual shortcuts that they were perhaps forced to fall back on in the past - we can move beyond the absurd musclemen in loin cloths and pneumatic women in furry bikinis.

Of course, video games are about escapism the same as any other form of entertainment, and sometimes its fun to play the part of a muscle-bound, machine gun toting protagonist for a few minutes each day. But at the same time, there's often a sense of disconnection with the onscreen characters, at least for me; often, they're too perfect (in the case of, say, Resident Evil's Leon) or they're a bunch of monosyllabic jocks (like the entire cast of Gears of War) that are nigh-on impossible to identify with.

Characters that have the same failings as the rest of us - lazy, grumpy in the mornings, a boundless appetite for cake - are all too rare, and I think it's high time video game protagonists were made a little more human. After all, who's to say that Master Chief doesn't have to go on a diet before each Halo sequel, just to squeeze himself back into that body armour once again?

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.